Jetliner search: No objects retrieved

PERTH, Australia – No debris spotted in an area off the west coast of Australia has been recovered, a Malaysian minister involved in the search for the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 said yesterday.

The first plane back from the search yesterday, a Chinese Ilyushin IL-76, spotted three floating objects, China’s official Xinhua news agency said, a day after several planes and ships combing the newly targeted area closer to Australia saw other objects, including two rectangular items that were blue and gray.

The three objects spotted by the Chinese plane yesterday were white, red and orange in color.

Defense Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters near Kuala Lumpur after meeting several families of passengers on the plane that there was no new information on the objects, which could just be regular debris or could be from the missing plane.

“I’ve got to wait to get the reports on whether they have retrieved those objects... Those will give us some indication,” Hishammuddin said.

The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said that objects cannot be verified or discounted as being from Flight MH370 until they are relocated and recovered by ships.

Flight 370 disappeared on March 8 while bound from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, and investigators have been puzzling over what might have happened aboard the plane, with speculation ranging from equipment failure and a botched hijacking to terrorism or an act by one of the pilots.

The latter was fueled by reports that the pilot’s home flight simulator had files deleted from it, but Hishimmuddin said checks, including ones by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, turned up no new information.

“What I know is that there is nothing sinister from the simulators but of course that will have to be confirmed by the chief of police,” he said.

Newly analyzed satellite data shifted the search zone on Friday, raising hopes searchers may be closer to getting physical evidence that that the plane crashed in the Indian Ocean with 239 people aboard.

That would also help narrow the hunt for the wreckage and the plane’s black boxes, which could contain clues to what caused the plane to be so far off-course.

The US Navy has already sent equipment that can detect pings from the back boxes, and Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott told reporters in Sydney that the equipment would be put on an Australian naval ship soon.

Other officials said it could take days for the ship, the Ocean Shield, to reach the search area.

The newly targeted zone is nearly 1,130 kilometers northeast of sites the searchers have crisscrossed for the past week. The redeployment came after analysts determined that the plane may have been traveling faster than earlier estimates and would therefore have run out of fuel sooner.

Search planes were sent out yesterday from Perth, Australia in a staggered manner, so at least one plane will be over the area for most of the daylight hours, according to AMSA.

The search area spans about 319,000 square kilometers, roughly the size of Poland. In most places, depths range from about 2,000 meters to 4,000 meters, although the much deeper Diamantina trench edges the search area.

The hunt for the plane focused first on the Gulf of Thailand, along the plane’s planned path. But when radar data showed it had veered sharply west, the search moved to the Andaman Sea, off the western coast of Malaysia, before pivoting to the southern Indian Ocean, southwest of Australia.

That change was based on analysis of satellite data. But officials said a reexamination of that analysis indicated the aircraft was traveling faster than previously estimated, resulting in increased fuel use and reducing the possible distance it could have flown before going down.

If investigators can determine the plane went down in the newly targeted zone, recovery of its flight data and cockpit voice recorders could be complicated.

Relatives and friends of the passengers said they were tortured by the uncertainty over the fate of their loved ones, as they wait for hard evidence that the plane had crashed. – AP